Maybe America should have sent John Adams to London to talk about British independence. That’s what we take from a cable just in from Stephen MacLean of the Disraeli-Macdonald Institute, who forwards the results of the latest poll from Sky News. Before the latest visit, Sky reports, Mr. Obama appeared to be an asset to the camp that opposes Britain being an independent country. That is the camp to which Mr. Obama belongs. After his visit, he starts to look like a liability.

Almost one in three — or 29% — now say they are less likely to vote with the camp opposing independence. Those who don’t want to “remain” within the EU are up 12 percentage points since Thursday, Sky reports, and are “now a higher proportion than the 22% who say Mr. Obama makes them more likely to vote Remain.” It adds that Mr. Obama “appears to have both put off sympathetic younger people and incurred the wrath of skeptical older people.”

The “hard-hitting” nature of Mr. Obama’s intervention in the British vote, scheduled for June, is what Sky News suggests is the basis for the shift in the poll. It notes that Mr. Obama suggested that Britain would be sent “to the back of the queue” in negotiating trade deals with America. Sky says that “appears to have turned him from an asset to a drag.” As it should have. It’s hard to think of a nastier formulation with which to try to strong-arm a friend.

At one point Mr. Obama was suggesting that if Britain does hold out for independence, it would take five or ten years to negotiate a trade pact with America. What an absurd statement. It took Mr. Obama only a few months to negotiate a breath-taking appeasement with the Iranian camarilla. It opens the sluice for $150 billion to be pumped into a terror-supporting regime that is our oft-declared enemy. Why should a trade pact with a friend be so much harder?

Mr. Obama’s approach to British independence is bizarre — starting with the question of whether to intervene in the referendum in the first place. It was only a year ago that the President was towering rage over the prospect that Prime Minister Netanyahu would be addressing a joint meeting of Congress on the Iran deal. Now he’s jumping in to a closely fought referendum over something that has nothing to do with America. The New York Post nailed this point the other day.

The idea that Mr. Obama is promoting — that it’s good for America for Britain to remain in Europe and forsake its thousand years of independence — is just backwards. America has no logical interest for Britain to remain in Europe. Better, insofar as America is concerned, for Britain to expand its relations with America, with whom it has in the last century and a half (or more) stood more closely with America than the EU or any European country.

This kind of logic was apparent to John Adams (and his president, Geo. Washington), even while the wounds of the Revolutionary War were being bound. A re-enactment of Adams’ meeting with George III, from the magnificent HBO series on Adams life, is viewable on youtube.com. It captures the King’s words about how he was “the last to consent” to the separation between England and America.

“But,” he added, “the Separation having been made and having become inevitable, I have always said, as I say now, that I would be the first to meet the Friendship of the United States as an independent Power.” Imagine if John Adams had stood before his long-time foe and told him he’d have to get at the back of a long queue. Adams, though, was too wise for that, and it’s a pity that Mr. Obama didn’t grasp the history.

All the more so because, in the event, it book but two years from the formal end of the Revolutionary War to the signing of the Jay Treaty of amity, commerce and navigation between America and the British king. No Internet, no telephones, no facsimile. The Jay Treaty opened a special relationship that lasted two centuries. It had its ups and downs, no doubt; the War of 1812, of course, and British treachery during the Civil War, in which it stood officially neutral but flirted with the South.

There was a moment when Adams was asked by Geo. III about rumors that he was not the most fond of France. That’s when Adams issued his famous reply: “I must avow to your Majesty, I have no Attachments but to my own Country.” It would have been a apt answer for Mr. Obama to have given Elizabeth II or David Cameron — or anyone else who asked his opinion of whether Britain ought to give up its independence in favor of France and the rest of the European Union.